- TraTraTrax starts a new ambient label with a record of beautiful textures and hazy cumbia rhythms.
- Nicolás Vallejo has a distinct approach to cumbia. The Bogotá producer got his start as part of the band La MiniTK del Miedo, a group making so-called "gothic cumbia." He went solo under the alias ezmeralda in 2021, trading the industrial chug of his first group for a slower take on the genre. He pitched the rhythms down and stripped the tracks to their component parts to create wistful and melancholic memories of cumbia past. His latest release, Ruido y Flor, which inaugurates TraTraTrax's cheekily titled downtempo label, Ambie—Tón, goes in a slightly different direction, filled with fuzzy ambient experiments.
The elements of cumbia on the record are stratigraphic. If you burrow deep into "Moriremos" or "Madre," you can find fossilised traces of strange drum configurations. Underneath the shimmering arpeggio of "El amor eficaz," there's something like the rhythmic sway of the guacharaca. But even without lilting rhythms, the tracks still have a driving momentum. The undulating chords on "Moriremos" shimmer in and out of focus like the tide slowly drifting out to reveal a yellow-sanded beach beneath a rocky high tideline. The looped samples of cicadas over the slow burning chords on "Allá" remind me of the soundscapes you hear on labels like Past Inside the Present.
The record features Vallejo's most striking melodies to date. At first pass, Ruido y Flor might scan as a continuation of Vallejoy's penchant for doom and gloom, the kind we heard on his excellent 2022 debut album. (After all, "Moriremos" translates in English to "we will die.") But it's more hopeful, maybe even optimistic. The sluggish gurgle of "Un jardin" yields to one of the record's most cinematic passages, as an organ pipes across the top. It's a welcome evolution for for Vallejo and a promising start for a label who has yet to miss.
Tracklist01. El amor eficaz
02. Allá
03. Canal muerto con flores
04. Moriremos
05. Un jardín
06. Madre